VirtualHost Examples

This document attempts to answer the commonly-asked questions about
setting up virtual hosts. These scenarios are those involving multiple
web sites running on a single server, via name-based or IP-based virtual hosts.

See also

Your server has multiple hostnames that resolve to a single address,
and you want to respond differently for www.example.com
and www.example.org.

Note

Creating virtual
host configurations on your Apache server does not magically
cause DNS entries to be created for those host names. You
must have the names in DNS, resolving to your IP
address, or nobody else will be able to see your web site. You
can put entries in your hosts file for local
testing, but that will work only from the machine with those
hosts entries.

The asterisks match all addresses, so the main server serves no
requests. Due to the fact that the virtual host with
ServerName www.example.com is first
in the configuration file, it has the highest priority and can be seen
as the default or primary server. That means
that if a request is received that does not match one of the specified
ServerName directives, it will be served by this first
<VirtualHost>.

The above configuration is what you will want to use in almost
all name-based virtual hosting situations. The only thing that this
configuration will not work for, in fact, is when you are serving
different content based on differing IP addresses or ports.

Note

You may replace * with a specific IP address
on the system. Such virtual hosts will only be used for
HTTP requests received on connection to the specified IP
address.

However, it is additionally useful to use *
on systems where the IP address is not predictable - for
example if you have a dynamic IP address with your ISP, and
you are using some variety of dynamic DNS solution. Since
* matches any IP address, this configuration
would work without changes whenever your IP address
changes.

The server machine has two IP addresses (192.168.1.1
and 172.20.30.40). The machine is sitting between an
internal (intranet) network and an external (internet) network. Outside
of the network, the name server.example.com resolves to
the external address (172.20.30.40), but inside the
network, that same name resolves to the internal address
(192.168.1.1).

The server can be made to respond to internal and external requests
with the same content, with just one <VirtualHost> section.

You have multiple domains going to the same IP and also want to
serve multiple ports. The example below illustrates that the name-matching
takes place after the best matching IP address and port combination
is determined.

The server machine has two IP addresses (172.20.30.40 and
172.20.30.50) which resolve to the names
www.example.com and www.example.org
respectively. In each case, we want to run hosts on ports 80 and
8080.

The following example allows a front-end machine to proxy a
virtual host through to a server running on another machine. In the
example, a virtual host of the same name is configured on a machine
at 192.168.111.2. The ProxyPreserveHost
On directive is used so that the desired hostname is
passed through, in case we are proxying multiple hostnames to a
single machine.

Catching every request to any unspecified IP address and
port, i.e., an address/port combination that is not used for
any other virtual host.

<VirtualHost _default_:*>
DocumentRoot "/www/default"
</VirtualHost>

Using such a default vhost with a wildcard port effectively prevents
any request going to the main server.

A default vhost never serves a request that was sent to an
address/port that is used for name-based vhosts. If the request
contained an unknown or no Host: header it is always
served from the primary name-based vhost (the vhost for that
address/port appearing first in the configuration file).

The default vhost for port 80 (which must appear before any
default vhost with a wildcard port) catches all requests that were sent
to an unspecified IP address. The main server is never used to serve a
request.

The name-based vhost with the hostname
www.example.org (from our name-based example, setup 2) should get its own IP
address. To avoid problems with name servers or proxies who cached the
old IP address for the name-based vhost we want to provide both
variants during a migration phase.

The solution is easy, because we can simply add the new IP address
(172.20.30.50) to the VirtualHost
directive.

We have a server with two name-based vhosts. In order to match the
correct virtual host a client must send the correct Host:
header. Old HTTP/1.0 clients do not send such a header and Apache has
no clue what vhost the client tried to reach (and serves the request
from the primary vhost). To provide as much backward compatibility as
possible we create a primary vhost which returns a single page
containing links with an URL prefix to the name-based virtual
hosts.

Due to the ServerPath
directive a request to the URL
http://www.sub1.domain.tld/sub1/ is always served
from the sub1-vhost. A request to the URL
http://www.sub1.domain.tld/ is only
served from the sub1-vhost if the client sent a correct
Host: header. If no Host: header is sent the
client gets the information page from the primary host.

Please note that there is one oddity: A request to
http://www.sub2.domain.tld/sub1/ is also served from the
sub1-vhost if the client sent no Host: header.

The RewriteRule directives
are used to make sure that a client which sent a correct
Host: header can use both URL variants, i.e.,
with or without URL prefix.

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